Appointment of Prof. Yamamura
Ms. Sakura Yamamura has been appointed to the Junior Professorship of Digital Methods in Human Geography at the Department of Geography, effective March 1, 2022. With her expertise in cultural and social geography of migration and urban studies, she will bring new emphasis to the study of the digital environment and the contexts of digitization in geography, and will also advance the use of new digital methods for the study of human geography. Digitization is not only part of her research project, but also an important aspect of her teaching in cultural geography.Ms. Yamamura was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Sociocultural Diversity at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Multifaith and Multiethnic Societies until February 2022. There, she worked on the socio-spatial transformations of global cities such as Tokyo and Frankfurt induced by the interaction of different transnational actors. In the context of migration-induced diversification of societies (superdiversity), she also conducted research on migrant entrepreneurship. Using both quantitative and qualitative methods, her work sheds new light on the geographical location and contextualization of new social phenomena.She studied geography, sociology, and anthropology at the University of Hamburg, the Université de Paris 1 - Sorbonne, and the University of California at Berkeley. She was also a Junior Visiting Fellow at the Maastricht Centre for Citizenship, Migration, and Development (MACIMIDE) at Maastricht University. From 2015 to 2019, she taught at the Departments of Geography at the University of Hamburg and the Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, where she also implemented innovative teaching concepts, especially in blended learning and practice-oriented service learning.Previously, she worked in the Migration Research Group at the Hamburg Institute of International Economics (HWWI), and also brings non-university professional experience from her work as a policy analyst and consultant in the International Migration Division of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and at the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF).